Song Triptych": Reflections on a Debussyan Genre
Code, D.J. (2013) The "song triptych": reflections on a Debussyan genre. Scottish Music Review, 3 (1). ISSN 1755-4934 Copyright © 2013 The Author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge Content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder(s) When referring to this work, full bibliographic details must be given http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/68794/ Deposited on: 14 February 2014 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk THE SONG TRIPTYCH: REFLECTIONS ON A DEBUssYAN GENRE David Code University of Glasgow À quoi bon, vraiment, accorder la voix de Bilitis soit en majeur, soit en mineur puisqu’elle a la voix la plus persuasive du monde? – Tu me diras, ‘Pourquoi as-tu fait la musique?’ Ça, vieux loup, c’est autre chose … C’est pour autres décors. Debussy, letter to Pierre Louÿs SCOTTISCH MUSIC REVIEW SCOTTISCH As is well known, Debussy significantly altered his approach to song composition around the years 1890– 91. While he had been writing mélodies more or less continuously since his earliest student days, up to this point he had tended to set texts either singly or in various different groupings – as in, for example, the six Ariettes, paysages belges et aquarelles of 1888 (later revised as Ariettes oubliées, 1903), and the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire of 1887–89. Starting from around 1890, he was to conceive and present the vast majority of his mélodies in sets of three, often titled as such – as in one of the first,Trois mélodies de Paul Verlaine (composed 1891, published 1901) and the last, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913).
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